Vince Samios - Internet Marketing Expert » Technology

High Speed 2 - UK’s High Speed Train Network

Vince Samios — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:46:36 +0000

Not the actual High Speed 2 Train AFAIK.

The new proposed "High Speed 2" UK High Speed Train Network will cost an estimated £89.5 Million per mile of new track - with a total of 335 miles in the completed High Speed 2 rail network. Another way to visualise the cost is as approx £55,000 per meter so a rail link from your front door to the road could cost as much as half a million pounds. Jaw dropping!

Some Vital Statistics:

Up to 250mph (400km/h)
119 Miles of track (Phase 1), 335 Miles total
London to Birmingham - 2026 (Phase 1)
Birmingham to Leads & Manchester - 2035 (Phase 2)
Costs Up to £17.4 Billion Phase 1
Additional £12.6 Billion for Phase 2
Capacity of up to 18 trains/hour
1100 Passengers capacity on each train
30,000 Passengers per day at approx 10% capacity

Travel time savings from High Speed 2 are estimated as follows:

Destination (from London) -	Phase 1 travel time savings -	Phase 2 travel time savings
Birmingham	23 Minutes	23 Minutes
Manchester	28 Minutes	43 Minutes
Leeds	0 Minutes	60 Minutes
Glasgow	29 Minutes	59 Minutes
Edinburgh	0 Minutes	60 Minutes

The High Speed 2 Route

The predecessor to High Speed 2 was the High Speed 1 rail network which hits a maximum of 186mph between the channel tunnel and London, in comparison High Speed 2 has a maximum speed for 250mph (likely to be closer to 220mph) and in that respect High Speed 2 stacks up nicely.

The cost of High Speed 2 has been a point of dispute, but the entire cost over the next 24 years is less than 0.05% of the UK’s total GDP, not a significant amount, and arguably the link from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds will increase that GDP by more than 5 hundredths of a percent.

The speed of the High Speed 2 network puts trains in a position to compete with flying between major cities as the fastest method of transport. Including checking in, dropping off luggage, waiting around the boarding lounge, waiting for takeoff, landing, taxiing to the air bridge, collecting your baggage and making your way back onto a decent travel network (ever flown to luton?) the journey by train from Manchester to London is likely to take half as much time as flying.

At this rate tickets will be more expensive than flying, in fact the current "low speed" network generally costs more than flying. The cost of tickets is a major problem with the current rail network, and I look forward to some announcement of High Speed 2 ticket prices. But I don’t hold much hope, and I don’t think its appropriate to postulate about prices of a rail ticket in fifteen years.

In my personal opinion, High Speed 2 is an essential move for the UK, just as Australia has made an essential move into a high speed broadband roll-out which leaves most countries to shame. The fact is if a country doesn’t keep pace with development, the country as a whole will stagnate and suffer.

The cost of the network seems entirely absurd - £556 per centimeter of track… that means it would cost me £23,630 to lay a High Speed 2 rail network from one corner of my laptop screen, to the farther corner… a mere 42.5cm

But who am I to say the logistics of laying a high speed rail network such as the one proposed for High Speed 2 should cost any less - all the infrastructure, the costs of the trains, the costs of buying people off their land, the costs of digging great whopping tunnels through mountains.

At this stage my personal view is - yes, its a good move, even in this economy.

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My Top 6 Favourite Gadgets

Vince Samios — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:09:25 +0000

1. Sunrise Alarm Clock - SRS260

I’m really not a morning person, and I find winter in Europe very difficult to deal with. If I wake up to an alarm clock I feel I’ve been shocked into the world, and I remain tired for the rest of the day. I don’t have the same problem in the summer, because sun streams in through the window and I wake up naturally and refreshed.

The Sunrise Alarm Clock mimics natural sunrise, allowing your body to gently rise from its slumber over the course of 45 minutes or so. I find I don’t need any audio alarm with the Sunrise Alarm because my body simply knows when to wake up, I open my eyes, and I feel good.

My sunrise alarm clock also has the option to play MP3 audio, and comes pre-packed with a selection of nature sounds. While the “Bleep Bleep Bleep” of an alarm clock is entirely intolerable, soft bird song is actually nice to wake up to.

If you think you can buy an alarm clock for £5, the cost of a sunrise alarm clock can be quite off-putting (upwards of £100) - but I quantify that cost as spending £1/day for the “dark season” so as not to feel like an anvil.

2. Vacuum Trimmer - Philips QT4090/32

I hate shaving - it’s an annoying, messy, waste of bloody time. I generally walk around with stubble and when it gets unmanageable or itchy it’s just gotta come off. This used to mean I created a gargantuan mess which took ages to tidy (hair all over the sink, taps, floor, mirrors, toothbrushes….)

Phillips does a nifty little trimmer with a built-in vacuum. It sounds entirely absurd and gimmicky, but it works. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight less messy than any other method I’ve seen. It isn’t waterproof, but it doesn’t really need to be. Shaving in the shower is to reduce mess, and isn’t always comfortable, but without the mess I can shave in front of a mirror which isn’t fogged up, and I don’t have to worry about imminent divorce papers as a result.

3. Juicer - Phillips HR1861

Carrot juice with a hint of ginger… yum! With a juicer you get what you pay for - any dual purpose device (juicer/food processor) will leave you entirely annoyed because it doesn’t do either of its tasks properly.

The reasons for loving a juicer are obvious, fresh juice, but if you get a cheap juicer you’ll end up sticking it in a cupboard and never using it. The Phillips HR1861 does an excellent job of juicing and its components are dishwasher safe. Make a glass of juice, empty the hopper, stick everything in the dishwasher - done.

4. Swiss Army Knife - Craftsman

I forget when I was given my first Craftsman swiss army knife, but it was in my early teens as a birthday gift from my grandmother. The single difference of the Craftsman model over other models, which makes it a million times more useful, is instead of a bottle-opener it has a phillips head screwdriver. The Craftsman is literally identical to the Swiss Army Handyman except for the phillips head screwdriver.

My first Craftsman was stolen out of my luggage between Bangkok Airport and Phnom Penh, and it wasn’t until I went on holiday to Geneva that I found the same knife. This time I had it engraved with my name.

The longevity of these tools is phenomenal, and the number of times the Swiss Army Craftsman has saved the day are uncountable.

While on holiday in Amsterdam once, I was staying in a friends new apartment which had only a brand new, unbuilt, ikea bed. I shopped for hours looking for the right tools to put it together, but I wasn’t having any luck and I was getting desperate. I ended up buying a “Swiss Army Tinker Small” which also includes the Phillips head screwdriver, and build the entire bed with just this multi-tool.

5. Walimex Timer Remote

This nifty little piece of kit allow anyone with a Canon Digital SLR Camera to shoot time lapse over long periods. Its a very simple little gadget which plugs into the remote socket of the camera and triggers the shutter at pre-set intervals, and for pre-set durations (if you so wish) - This also allows you to time shutter speeds over the standard maximum 30 seconds, so you can more accurately expose night shots on very dark nights.

There are a few other options for canon timer remote controls, but I found they were more expensive and had less functionality.

6. In Car Power Inverter

In-Car power inverters should come as a standard feature on all cars - the ability to plug in most small devices with normal 240v power requirements is extremely useful. Laptops, Flood Lights, Portable Fridges, Camera Chargers, even mobile phone charges if you don’t have an in-car charger. I use mine all the time, its a reasonably unusual item for most people, which is why it makes the list.

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My 5 Favourite iPhone Apps

Vince Samios — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:47:56 +0000

5. TED Mobile

I’m a big fan of the TED talks, and TED Mobile makes an appearance on an almost religious basis for a regular dose of intelligence. Its a fairly simple app with the latest talks easily available.

4. TVCatchup

I can’t remember the last time I turned my TV - with internet TV proving itself as a much more convenient and flexible option for TV consumption. TVCatchup app for iPhone collates a list of internet TV channels including all the popular ones such as BBC One, ITV1, Channel 4, E4, Dave, Film4, etc etc etc. The list of live TV channels is extensive to say the least, and renders cable TV somewhat redundant.

3. TuneIn Radio

Possibly one of the most comprehensive lists of internet radio stations on this fair planet, with excellent searching ability and genre categorization. Simply searching for “christmas” brought up a list of radio stations specialising in christmas songs. I especially enjoy having Dutch radio stations on tap to keep my linguistic skills polished.

2. AroundMe

While I wish the AroundMe app has more information and features, its extremely useful for traveling and spontaneous activities. While in Plymouth I used this app to find places to eat on every night of our stay, when we wanted somewhere close but of a certain style. We found the fantastic “Posatino Restaurant” in plymouth with this app, and for that experience alone AroundMe earns its spot as my second favourite app.

1. Waze

Waze is a free sat nav app with community interaction. Combining traffic reports with data from other travelers, Waze gives you the extremely accurate estimated times of arrival, and gives you real-time information about surrounding road conditions including hazards, average speeds, road works, etc.

Possibly my favourite part of the Waze App is the ability to identify where speed traps are hiding, and sharing this information with other travels. In turn, other travels can give you a heads up an where and when the police and trying to catch people out.

Waze is still a very new app, and while 95% of navigation is flawless, there are still times when it sends you to scotland via mongolia. TomTom and other sat-navs also aren’t flawless, the brilliant part of Waze is that if you notice a problem you can notify the map editors and with 24 hours anomalies are usually fixed. I know of atleast a few intersections where the Waze data totally out-strips other Sat Navs.

The traffic reporting is also superior to any other sat nav due to the community input of live data.

Probably not an good app for people who are paranoid about big brother knowing everything, but I live on planet earth and Waze is an excellent and revolutionary app.

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Heading Over Seas - Leaving the cold behind!

Vince Samios — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 06:42:28 +0000

On Monday I jump on a plane back to Cambodia for two months to explore some exciting opportunities and team up with some old friends.
I bought the new Macbook last week in preparation – These things are sweet! The new multi-touch keypad is revolutionary to productivity! It’s the first time I’ve not felt restricted when using a touch pad rather than a normal mouse!
My flight transfers are a little close so I’m only taking hand luggage. Typical geek traveling with two laptops and no clothes… not a single item of clothing will find its way into my suitcase. When shirts cost £0.75, why bother?
I was worried the boys would miss me, so we have set up a permanent two way video conferencing link, and I can remote into my office workstation from my mac. This trip is going to be a good test of how easily we can work remotely. It’s also going to be a bit of fun sitting on a tropical beach with a laptop while the boys back in Manchester rug up and stay indoors.
Until Monday there won’t be a single sober night – tropics here I come!!!

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Googlebot Crawls Through Forms?

Vince Samios — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:42:52 +0000

A very off-hand comment made by Matt Cutts about Googlebot’s ability to “crawl through forms” 1 min 28 seconds into this video.

It would be a mistake to be equally casual about this - in my own experience this is POWERFUL!

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Activating the Wordpress Theme

Vince Samios — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:42:43 +0000

The wordpress theme needs a post in order to activate the super funky banner menu - so this is that post

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Extremely Mobile Business

Vince Samios — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:40:14 +0000

Traveling down the motorway at 70mph, hooked up to the internet and on a skype call with a colleague on his iPhone… I asked him to take a screen shot, and I took a photo from my end. You can see the 3g router sitting in the side pocket of the car with the 3g dongle dangling from the passenger handle.

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Location Independent – In Car Wireless – 3G Router

Vince Samios — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:43:22 +0000

Location Independence is what us Internet people aspire to. Being able to work from anywhere in the world because all our affairs are managed online. Our accounts, invoicing, lead tracking and emails are all hosted online accessible from any internet connection, and our staff can be managed remotely.

Even phone lines can be diverted via VOIP to any internet connection.

To many people Location Independence simply means being able to take care of our affairs whenever we have access to the Internet. With the invention of the 3G Dongle we can sit on a park bench with our laptops and do what we need to do.

But I’ve hit barriers when I’ve wanted to share my 3G internet connection with others, and when visiting clients inside a buildings with poor mobile phone reception. And when we’re out in the bush, or in open fields, what happens when our laptop batteries run down?

The solution has been to run a wireless router in my car, which can stay connected and which can be accessed by multiple people within 50 meters (or more, if we are outdoors). I’m also running 240v power from my car battery which keeps the laptops charged.

These are the pieces of the In Car Wireless puzzle.

I need power: 150w 12v to 240v Car Power Inverter (Ebay)

And a 3G Internet Dongle (Funnily enough my provider is “3”)

And a 3G Router capable of connecting to 3G via a USB port: Netgear MBR624GU (Refurbished models available on ebay for £50)

By running a 3G dongle through a 3G router we can treble our 3G reception and hence internet speeds because there is more power running to the 3G dongle which can also be placed in a better position (like out of the sunroof as in the picture below.)

Myself and 10 others can share the internet connection wherever we are, which has been great for business sabbaticals. We roll down to the waters edge, fire up the 3G Wireless, and crack on with the important (and often bloody boring) tasks for the day.

Travelling for conferences or visiting clients we can run a strong steady wireless connection in the car and in hotel rooms. It just makes life so much easier, and more fun, and more relaxing.

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The Dyson Air Multiplier (Dyson AM01)

Vince Samios — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:41:57 +0000

When designing the airblade hand dryer, which dries hands by forcing air out of a .3mm wide slit at over 600km/h to effectively squeegee the water off your hands, Dyson noticed that a huge amount of additional air was being drawn into the process.

Frustrated with the traditional fan, which creates buffeting by slicing at the air, and the inherent dangers of fan blades spinning around, Dyson investigated using the effect he noticed with the hand dryer to move air in other ways.

The bladeless fan forces air through a 1.3mm slit on the inside of “the ring” and out the back.

Only 7% of the air pushed out by the bladeless fan comes from an impellor (which has unevenly spaced blades and holes drilled into them to reduce noise) – the rest is drawn in by creating a negative pressure area within the ring and forcing it out backwards.

There are two stages of negative pressure, which work together to “multiply the air” – the first is a traditional aerofoil design (low pressure surface, or lifting surface, inside the ring) and the second stage is actually just a twist on a traditional aerofoil with a 15 degree slope which actually draws air in from the back. There is actually also a third stage of “air multiplication” which uses an effect called viscous shearing, which is used in jet aircraft to reduce noise, to further multiply the amount of air being forced backwards.

Effectively the original airflow is multiplied 16 times through physics. cool!

Even the tilt function of the Dyson AM01 rotates around the center of gravity of the fan.

Absolutely brilliant.

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Screenflow PC (windows) how-to

Vince Samios — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:17:36 +0000

A commenter posted on my blog post Screenflow on PC mentioning its been 6 months 1 week since I first wrote about getting screenflow to run on not just windows, but PC (x86) hardware…

I’ve been meaning to do a physical demonstration video proving that screenflow was running on windows hardware, but I just blatantly haven’t had the time. This was essentially a hobby and I’ve had much more important things to do.

As such, I’ve decided to release how it’s done without teasing you anymore.

The reason I came up with this solution was because I wanted to do a demonstration of a software/hardware combination product which only worked on x86 and Windows XP.

There is no decent screenflow alternative for x86 hardware, and to be honest, screenflow doesn’t run 100% smoothly on windows hardware. But as it stands, it’s still better than any other screenflow alternative.

I definitely don’t have time to elaborate, but anybody keen enough is bound to be able to work it out from these super simple instructions.

1. Load OSX on PC (x86/Windows) hardware (yes it is possible)

2. Run windows virtualisation on your “OSX on PC” installation

3. Run screenflow within OSX and screenflow your windows virtualisation session.

That’s how I did it… simple! (Not really, a lot of faffing)

There are some other solutions that also work, but not as well… and you need a mac for both…

If you have a mac and want to screenflow windows only software just run windows virtualisation on osx and screenflow on osx.

If you want to screenflow a windows and x86 hardware combination (software and hardware) and you have a mac, you can run screenflow on the mac, and then VNC into the windows machine.

I dual booted my x86/PC machine with OSX and Windows, but in retrospect only a single boot into OSX was required with Windows virtualisation running (obviously, duh)

There you go – cat out of the bag… enjoy.

btw, this works for anything you can get running in virtualisation which includes vista. That’s right! Screenflow for Vista! Even Screenflow for Linux!

Sorry its been so long!

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Ebay Telephone Upsell

Vince Samios — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:58:28 +0000

A good friend of mine, Phill Mason has produced an excellent guitar training course (not released yet) and asked me to check it out for him…

Since I’m pretty much Phill’s target audience, and since I do want to learn to play guitar, I decided to buy a guitar…

That’s the back-story, but that’s not the point of the story…

I decided to buy an Electric Acoustic guitar, as a romantic I love the acoustic sound, and as a geek I like to record stuff. Perfect combination.

I didn’t look around long – I like the look and the price of these electric acoustic guitars from a company called Lindo LTD, and made the buy.

My new guitar… gorgeous isn’t she…

The usual ebay buying process goes like this:

1. Choose Item
2. Win Item (bid or buy it now)
3. Pay for item
4. Item gets dispatched and delivered

Lindo LTD adds a step in there… a step so profoundly forehead smacking I was floored by the obvious.

Step 3 ½

Lindo LTD phones the buyer, thanks the buyer for the purchase, confirms the shipping method and destination… and…

Upsells!

“We also sell a 15watt amplifier to go with that guitar for £39, which we can bundle in with the same postage charge.”

After I declined, I was then offered a further discount.

When was the last time you made an ebay purchase and you received a phone call from the seller? Never right?!?

When was the last time an ebay seller tried to up-sell you? Never right?!?

WHY NOT?!?

It’s brilliant! I don’t know if the guitar is going to be any good, it was a cheapie after-all, but I sure as shit know I’m super impressed with Lindo LTD’s after sales marketing.